Winrar extraction & SSD's.

ubern00b

ubern00b

ubern00b

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I am trying to find out if extracting files in winrar using the "right click - extract here" method is any faster on an SSD. If extracting from one hard drive to another its pretty quick, but if extracting to the same location as the rar files its epic slow. Is this related to seek times, and if so is SSD any/much faster in this regard?

Anyone with some time on their hands willing to do some timing, I would appreciate it :)
 
If you think about it SSD's should be faster like you've mentioned with seek times. But I don't have any evidence to back that up :)
 
Reality|Bites said:
It's a slower failsafe mode for when I/O errors are detected on the drive.
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No I know what PIO mode is I just dont know what drive you are asking about?

Basically if you extract an archive from one drive to a different drive, its lightning fast (and no no drives are running in PIO) but if extracting to the same drive its over 2x slower. HDD raw throughput is not to blame so Im convinced it has to do with seek time so the "experiment" so to speak is to see if SSD's are any faster in this regard than regular hard drives.
 
Yeah it's because you are reading/writing to the same device, the HD heads can only be in one physical position at any one time, SSD shouldn't have the same issue but I've no proof that it will be any faster.
 
So does anybody know if unraring files will affect the life of a SSD? Reason i say this is because i download a lot of files in rar format and unrar them on my current mechanical HDD. Would i be better off setting my downloads to be downloaded onto a mechanical HDD and also unrar in this HDD rather than SSD?
 
Quoting myself from last month:
I did some benchmarks of my own (I'm a Usenet user too) and got an average of 36MB/s unrarring an uncompressed 6.8GB file split over 70 parts using 7zip on my Samsung F1, and 48.6MB/s on my Intel X25-M G2.
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So at least for 7Zip SSD's are faster. Just how slow is your "Epic Slow?" I got a pretty good result out of my F1 tbh, which could well be down to NCQ and AHCI. I assume that if your mechanical drive is fragmented write speeds will suffer further as the drive head will be moving about more.
I expect that SSD's like the Samsung and Indilinx models would be able to show results closer to 100MB/s thanks to optimised sequential writes.

So does anybody know if unraring files will affect the life of a SSD? Reason i say this is because i download a lot of files in rar format and unrar them on my current mechanical HDD. Would i be better off setting my downloads to be downloaded onto a mechanical HDD and also unrar in this HDD rather than SSD?
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Any writes will affect the lifespan, but don't worry about it, theres more than enough write cycles that the drive will be obsolete long before it runs out under any home usage. It's not a concern unless you're writing hundreds of GB every day for years.
 
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HEADRAT said:
Yeah it's because you are reading/writing to the same device, the HD heads can only be in one physical position at any one time, SSD shouldn't have the same issue but I've no proof that it will be any faster.
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SSD does have the same issue, you can't read and write to the same drive at the same time, it's nothing to do with the heads :)

I should expect unraring from the SSD to the HD (in the case of the F1 and X25) to be the fastest, assuming the HD isn't fragmented. Since the bottleneck would be either write speed or read speed of whichever was slowest, reading from the X25 would be bottlenecked by the F1 writing, about 100MB/s. The other way round would bottleneck to about 70MB/s.
 
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